French Savers Are Likely to Reject Le Pen’s Anti-Euro Message

Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate of the National Front in France, wants to reintroduce a national currency alongside the euro.CreditPhilippe Wojazer/Reuters

By Swaha Pattanaik

May 3, 2017

French savers are a good bulwark against Marine Le Pen winning the presidential election on Sunday.

Ms. Le Pen, the far-right presidential hopeful, has a strong core of supporters who back her euroskeptic manifesto. And her spendthrift economic policies may appeal to voters whose jobs and personal finances are precarious. But a vow to abandon the single currency is likely to repel undecided voters in a country with the third-highest savings rate in the eurozone.

French households stash away more than 14 percent of their gross disposable income, according to the European Union’s statistics office. Only Germans and Slovenes are bigger savers in the eurozone, while outside the bloc, the British save less than half that amount. Thriftiness brings with it a wariness of anything that might erode the value of such nest eggs, like Ms. Le Pen’s plan to reintroduce a national currency alongside the euro.

Critics say the euro would slump in value, money would flow out of France and financial and economic chaos would ensue. With her presidential rival, the centrist Emmanuel Macron, around 20 percentage points ahead of her in the polls, Ms. Le Pen is trying to reassure voters this wouldn’t be the case. She said on April 29 that there was no rush to dump the euro and that other policy changes might take precedence. And in a Reuters interview published on Tuesday, she said capital controls could be imposed if there were a run on banks while she was negotiating an exit from the European Union, though they were unlikely to be needed.

Such efforts to appeal to a wider range of voters are unlikely to succeed. After all, Ms. Le Pen’s anti-euro creed is far from the only reason that voters are expected to pick Mr. Macron as president.

But in a nation of savers, this is a policy that the National Front will have to dilute if the party wants to improve its score in the future.

Swaha Pattanaik is an associate editor at Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com.